Everyone wants a piece of the pie. Decreasing margins and healthcare initiatives that focus solely on cost savings cause many of us to wonder if the good days will ever return. Making a decent profit in today’s environment is a difficult task for even the most astute business CEOs in optometry.
To find profits, increase the font so you can read between the lines in these three areas:
- Vision Benefit and Medical Insurance – Many medical insurances need a vision rider to meet requirements to provide vision services to various demographics. Consequently, we have seen a huge influx of low-paying vision benefit providers with thousands of patients. Most optometrists are on, have been on, or are thinking of joining these low-paying vision benefit panels. Without a profitability plan in place, you will be on the road to working harder for less money. There are ways to attack this animal:
- See more patients.
- Decrease cost of goods.
- Increase “spiffs” (Special Payment Incentive For Fast Sales) from vision benefit providers in using their product.
- Loss leader for the benefit of having access to the patients medical needs.
- Optical – As mentioned above, decreasing cost of goods or increasing spiffs can be an answer to greater profits with low-paying vision plans. The market is rewarding opticals that commit to the vision benefits products. This does not seem fair in a free world but the vision benefit plans incentivize you (pay you more) for using their product. This was the mainstay in pharmaceuticals until the pharmaceutical companies were mandated to not incentivize doctors for prescribing their product.
- Increase office efficiency – Numerous groups specialize in business efficiency. Many of us continue to do things the same way we did 10 years ago, although with the evolution of technology and patient care the business has completely changed. Many don’t even know where to start. It starts with breaking down the systems in the office and asking our colleagues how their systems work. For instance, how does our office spend significantly less time managing the frame board? Or how have we decreased the time spent on the phone scheduling an appointment?
All these ideas and thoughts take time and energy to think about and effectively execute. That is the difference between practices that are keeping large slices of the pie and those who only get a sliver. In today’s business world it requires adapting to change at a much faster rate then ever before. I’ve found that taking more time for administrative work and less time in patient care has allowed us to keep up with change and remain profitable.
